I'm back...

Hello.

I’m back.

Yes, it has been a while.

I’m doing well, how about you?

Actually, I am doing well now... November was a busy month with getting ready for our biennial Holiday Open House cookie-fest on the 11th of December. For some crazy reason, I decided to make a gingerbread replica of our house to use as a centerpiece for the party. Wait, go back, initially, for a brief moment of total insanity, I considered doing National Cathedral in gingerbread. Yikes! Just doing our square-box of a colonial (without the additions) was just about the death of me. I ended up spending hours and hours on it and that was only about half the amount of time I would have liked to have spent. But it came out pretty well. Here it is:


The week I baked the walls and roof was unseasonably humid and I did not take as much care as I should have in keep the pieces flat, so when it came time for assembly, there were some gaps. Also, I decided to pipe the dividers in the windows after I had made the molten sugar “glass” to pour over them. Let’s just say that piping straight lines under a time constraint is not one of my strengths. However, I was thrilled with how the tree came out – it was a lot of tedious work that I was afraid would be for naught.

If you noticed all the cookies surrounding the gingerbread house, those were for our Holiday Open House. Every other year (RWT refuses to allow me to do it every year, what a party-pooper), we invite all of our friends, neighbors and work colleagues over to stuff themselves silly with cookies. I still have to tally up the final count, but this year I made around thirty different kinds of cookies. [I am planning on posting one of cookie recipes here every week for your baking and eating pleasure, so stayed tuned.]

Unfortunately, in the midst of my baking frenzy, I really neglected my diet (yes, I had cookies for breakfast and sometimes lunch for nearly two weeks) and my food allergies got really out of hand. In fact, I spent one whole week thinking there was a distinct chance of my keeling over dead at any moment. But a consult to a specialist showed that simply was not true and I am no longer going to the military clinic doctor who put that idea into my head in the first place.

So with a renewed perspective on life (pondering imminent death for week will do that) and a better diet, I am writing here again. And it's good to be back.